Meet Natalia Roberts, ASLD Visiting Artist of Coloration Resident

Natalia Roberts didn’t got down to be a dancer—or a photographer, for that matter. The 32-year-old artist, who’s the latest featured visitor within the Artwork College students League of Denver’s (ASLD) Visiting Artist of Coloration Residency, found each artwork varieties later in life and pursued them the one means she knew how: all in.

Initially from Detroit, Roberts started dancing whereas attending school in St. Louis, the place she was learning to develop into an architect. She liked motion, and began studying all she may. “I made a decision at one level that as an alternative of designing with metal and concrete and bricks, I needed to design with our bodies and motion and storytelling,” she says.

At age 20, the educational curve was steep, so she packed her luggage and moved to New York Metropolis and enrolled in an intensive two-year program to coach. She would go on to make a dwelling as a dancer and choreographer earlier than an harm sidelined her for eight months.

Throughout this era, rehabilitation wasn’t the one factor that crammed her days. The lifelong learner—who nonetheless had visible arts expertise from her days as an structure scholar—was impressed to discover a brand new avenue for her creative expression: images. She shadowed an acquaintance who she had as soon as modeled for, photographer Rachel Neville, and labored as her assistant free of charge whereas taking video and images courses. “I began off largely utilizing video to help my very own choreography and doing dance,” Roberts says. “After which I began utilizing images as a option to collaborate and discover and create artwork with different dancers.”

In 2019, Roberts moved to San Francisco to proceed to hone her craft. When the pandemic hit and performing arts had been shut down, she turned inward and funneled the expertise by the lens of her digicam. “I started exploring an increasing number of deeply dance images, self-portraiture, and in addition documenting what was occurring within the pandemic, form of on a societal degree in addition to on the private degree,” she says. “And so images broadened out from only a option to discover and create throughout the world of dance to a option to doc what was occurring on the earth.”

In Could 2022, because the pandemic abated, Roberts moved to Denver along with her associate, who had all the time needed to reside within the mountains. This previous November, she joined ASLD because the second artist to take part in its Visiting Artist of Coloration Residency sequence, which invitations residents of varied backgrounds to make and train artwork throughout the ASLD group.

By way of summer season 2023, Roberts will discover video and images at ASLD’s studios, working towards a public artwork exhibition subsequent June. She is going to train two public images programs—one for youngsters to be taught fundamentals utilizing their smartphones and a extra in-depth DSLR course for all talents—this winter. She can be internet hosting casual meet-and-greets and open-studio periods all through, so Denverites can ask questions and observe her course of.

As for the artwork? True to kind, Roberts has no small objectives. “I’m going to be exploring totally different elements of our society and the way these are form of manifested throughout the particular person and the physique,” she says. “I wish to speak about a few of these bigger points that we’re going by, however all the time deliver them again to the human scale.” Particularly, she says, she’s specializing in surrealist images methods, comparable to obscuring a mannequin’s face or photographing solely physique elements, like a dancer’s again or limbs, to offer commentary on social points like local weather change, racial inequity, and battle. “From a deeply private sense, it’s attempting to determine the way to take care of the problems, and the way we are able to make it manageable for ourselves,” she says. “What’s it like to soak up that info, attempt to struggle for that info, or attempt to struggle for these sorts of points with out changing into overwhelmed?”

To discover these themes, Roberts is not going to solely curate her units, lights, and costumes, but in addition the fashions that deliver her imaginative and prescient to life. “I do select individuals quite intentionally,” she says. As a dancer with a non-traditional background, she says she has all the time been most impressed by performers who could not have had a lifetime of ballet coaching or a superbly pointed toe. This manifests in her work by portraying dancers of various races, ethnicities, talents, genders, and socioeconomic statuses.

“I all the time needed to decide on individuals who I feared wouldn’t be chosen in any other case and whose tales I assumed actually wanted to be advised,” she says. “Then I can even assist them create and chart their very own path. I believe it’s a extremely highly effective factor to be chosen and to be seen.”

And alongside the way in which, Roberts will proceed to do what she does finest: studying and exploring new themes and methods alongside her fashions and college students, all inside a brand new metropolis to name house.

“When on the lookout for a residency, I used to be trying particularly at methods of connecting with the Denver artwork scene,” she says. “I didn’t know a lot concerning the artwork scene in Denver, however I noticed that very same form of establishment in ASLD, and I used to be actually excited to develop into part of that group.”

Registration for Roberts’ teen images class opens December 6, and registration for her DSLR class opens February 7. Members of the general public can even drop by an open studio session with Roberts to look at her course of. Contact ASLD for extra info.